Commentary on Economics, Information and Human Action

Regulation’s effects on innovation in energy technologies: the experimentation connection

Remember the first time you bought a mobile phone (which in my case was 1995). You may have been happy with your land line phone, but this new mobile phone thing looks like it would be really handy in an emergency, so you-in-1995 said sure, I’ll get a cell phone, but not really use it that much. Then, the technology improved, and more of your friends and family got phones, so you used it more. Then you saw others with cool flip phones, in colors, and you did some searching to see if other phones had features you might like. Then came text messaging, and you experimented with learning a new shorthand language (or, if you’re like me, you stayed a pedant about spelling even in text messages that you had to tap out on number pad keys). You adopted text messaging, or not. Then came the touch screen, largely via the disruptive iPhone, and the cluster of smartphone innovation was upon us. Maybe you have a smartphone, maybe you don’t; maybe your smartphone is an iPhone, maybe it isn’t. But since 1995, your choice of communication technology, and the set from which you can choose, has changed dramatically.

This change didn’t happen overnight, and for most people was not a discrete move from old choice to new choice, A to B, without any other choices along the way. Similarly for technological change and the production of goods and services. For both consumers and producers, our choices in markets are the consequence of a process of experimentation, trial and error, and learning. Indeed, whether your perspective on dynamic competition is based on Schumpeter or Hayek or Kirzner (or all of the above), the fundamental essence of competition in market processes is that it’s a process of experimentation, trial and error, and learning, on the part of both producers and consumers. That’s how we get new products and services, that’s how we signal to producers whether their innovations are valuable to us as consumers, that’s how innovation creates economic growth and vibrancy, through the application of our creativity and our taste for creating and experiencing novelty.

This kind of dynamism is common in our world, and is increasingly an aspect of our lives that creates value for us; mobile telephony is the most obvious example, but even in products as mundane as milk, the fundamental aspect of the market process is this experimentation, trial and error, and learning. How else would Organic Valley have started coming out with a line of milk that is entirely from pasture-raised cows? (I am happily consuming this milk; pasture-raised cows make milk with more essential fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, very important for health)

But this kind of dynamism, while common, is not pervasive. Institutions matter, and in particular, various forms of government regulation can influence the extent to which such technological dynamism occurs in a market. The example I have in mind as a counterpoint, the example I want to explain and understand, is consumer-facing electricity technologies, like thermostats and home energy management systems. For the past several years there has been considerable innovation in this space, due to the application and extension of digital communication technology innovations. But despite the frequent claims over the past few years that this year will be the year of the consumer energy technology, it keeps not happening.

Tomorrow in New Orleans, at the Southern Economic Association meetings, I’ll be presenting a paper that grapples with this question. My argument is that traditional economic regulation of the electricity industry slows or stifles innovation because regulation undercuts the experimentation, trial and error, and learning of both producers and consumers. As I state in the abstract:

Persistent regulation in potentially competitive markets can undermine consumer benefits when technological change both makes those markets competitive and creates new opportunities for market experimentation. This paper applies the Bell Doctrine precedent of “quarantine the monopoly” to the electricity industry, and extends the Bell Doctrine by analyzing the role of market experimentation in generating the benefits of competition. The general failure to quarantine the monopoly wires segment and its regulated monopolist from the potentially competitive downstream retail market contributes to the slow pace and lackluster performance of retail electricity markets for residential customers. The form of this failure to quarantine the monopoly is the persistence of an incumbent default service contract that was intended to be a transition mechanism to full retail competition, coupled with the regulatory definition of product characteristics and market boundaries that is necessary to define the default product and evaluate the regulated monopolist’s performance in providing it. The consequence of the incumbent’s incomplete exit from the retail market suggests that as regulated monopolists and regulators evaluate customer-facing smart grid investments, regulators and other policymakers should consider the potential anti-competitive effects of the failure to quarantine the monopoly with respect to the default service contract and in-home energy management technology.

In August 2011 I wrote about the Bell Doctrine, Baxter’s precedent from the U.S. v. AT&T divestiture case, and how we have failed to quarantine the monopoly in electricity. This paper is an extension of that argument, and I welcome comments!

If you’ll be at the SEA meetings, I hope to see you there; I am headed to NOLA tonight, and look forward to a fun weekend full of good economic brain candy.